Pictured is an interesting improvised 9mm firearm being sold within criminal circles in Brazil. The entire trigger group / lower is from a standard paintball marker, allowing for a more useful semi-automatic (open-bolt) operation. A clever feature is the use of standard 9mm holed hexagonal brass bar stock as a crude smooth-bore barrel.

The magazine ‘latch’ is simply a bolt threaded into the magazine-well (turned clockwise to tighten) and It’s cocking handle appears to be a tilt knob from a desk chair.

Another example of just how effective a small arms ban would be. Never underestimate human ingenuity.

nova3930

Can’t stop the signal….

Tassiebush

That two fingered trigger is interesting. I think I’ve seen those used (on tv) with people alternating fingers rapidly giving a pseudo auto fire like effect. I guess the barrel wouldn’t last long but wouldn’t need to either.

PK

Smoothbore barrel, so it’s not going to be overly accurate in the first place.

Tassiebush

I’d imagine it’d start out with poor accuracy and deteriorate to unsafe. Having said that I’ve read a review of a liberator pistol (original ww2 .45acp. Not 3d printed thing) and it was very much accurate enough for well aimed deliberate shots despite being smooth bore. Minute of vital organ you could say.

PK

Indeed. I have to think that most criminals don’t bank on the firearm being accurate or their skill being adequate to make accurate shots, but rather the fear caused and the compliance gained by having a gun at all, especially in countries where guns aren’t widely available legally.

mosinman

i think what makes it “safe” to fire in the first place is that the barrel isn’t exactly 9mm in diameter, but probably a bit oversized , this would allow the propellant to burn, but a bit of gas would leak around the bullet keeping the pressures low enough for the crude barrel to handle

Tassiebush

Very true. Oversized bores are quite forgiving pressure wise. .50BMGin a 20gauge comes to mind as a real life example of this and I recall reading of pipe guns using. 50BMG cartridges during Solomon Islands civil war.

mosinman

i think Royal nonesuch uses that technique for his home made shotguns

Guilherme Atencio

The subtitles on the image mention something about those being special gun and ammo to make the murder investigation harder. Would this be because of the smooth bore?

Sianmink

Smoothbore would make it extremely hard to trace back to a specific gun if they didn’t recover the case as well.

though I’d figure with illegal guns in the first place it’s not as big a point, still better to get busted for an illegal gun than for murder.

Guilherme Atencio

Makes sense, but a smoothbore makes accuracy much worse, so I guess it’s pretty much a “spray and pray” gun, for short range only.

Sianmink

At conversation distance it really doesn’t matter.

Sam

You know, this is interesting. I used to go paintballing quite a bit. Electronic triggers are basically a must-have. I’d wondered what it’d take to kinda use that same technology in an actual firearm.

Pro paintballers have some crazy set-ups in their paintball markers that allow them to shoot multiple balls per trigger squeeze without it being technically full auto/burst. Like a ball fires when the trigger is depressed and when it is released, or other variants of that. I imagine it’d be pretty illegal because an electronic trigger can be programmed for any sort of settings, but that’d be cool on an actual firearm.

They do exist on “real guns”, but the BATFE has been somewhat down on them for the reasons you specified.

lucusloc

Not to mention reliability issues. I doubt electronic triggers would sell well on anything but sport guns.

Iggy

From what I’ve read you can also hack the electronic triggers so the marker is semi-auto normally, but after it’s been checked before the match, you do the correct sequence of trigger pulls and ‘magically’ unlock full auto mode.

Would like to see a ballistics test on this firearm 3 yards, 10 yards, 25 yards, then 100. Without the bullet spin, I would think bullet drop is significant after 10 yards. Any opinions?

Westwood

The bullet drop would be the same, gravity affects a bullet the same so matter how fast or how its spinning, but it will have a greater chance of tumbling

Joshua

which would negatively effect the ballistic co-efficient, though I would expect that to be negligible,

PK

…except if the bullet tumbles, the wind resistance increases, decreasing the velocity, increasing the amount of drop over distance.

iksnilol

I think he meant tumbling as in it would be more likely to tumble if it hit something.

You can get decent accuracy out of smoothbore guns. You just need to avoid using an undersized projectile. Just look at shotgun slugs. They work fine at shorter distances (100m and less).

FarmerB

Yes, but with some clever design the slug is either 1) rifled 2) fin stabilized or 3) drag stabilized or some combination. Without that – they’d be even worse.

iksnilol

The rifling on slugs doesn’t stabilize them, it prevents them from blowing off your choke.

FarmerB

On most designs, I believe that’s correct.

FarmerB

I’m actually toying with the idea of ‘long range shotgun slugging’. I have a heap of Brenneke slugs and the possibility to mount a serious optic on my Versamax. Suspect ‘long range’ will be less than 150m.

Tassiebush

I think widening grouping would be more significant than bullet drop if this were compared to a conventional barrel.

maodeedee

There’s another problem other than bullet spin. A rifled barrel actually accommodates an oversized projectile and the grooves in the barrels reduce friction even if the projectile is oversized as much as one full caliber. In other words, a bullet that is 31 caliber (311) can be fired in a 30 caliber (.308) barrel and maybe only increase pressures by about 5000-7000 psi. I had a 1917 Enfield that I accidently fired 8mm mauser in and nothing bad happened, but it was low pressure commercial ammo. But in WW2 some US soldiers tried Mauser ammo in their 30-06 guns and lived to tell the tale.

But smoothbore barrel projectiles need to be undersized and if not, the bullet becomes a bore obstruction pressures can increase significantly. This is why smoothbore musket had to rely on a patch to make a seal that could be compressed, with one of these guns the bore would have to be oversized to be safe and pressures could be reduced a couple hundred fps and accuracy would not be very good.

TheNotoriousIUD

How bad do you have to want to kill a MF’er to go to all that trouble?

Ryan

Ban paintball markers! Problem solved.

BR549

Yes, but then the feds would have to ban Yahtsee and Parchesi unless middle-class families complied with some trumped up interpretation of 922(r).

Trey

I know that it would be dangerous to the police officers, but I would love to see some video footage of some of these and other improvised firearms being fired

derpmaster

Obligatory

lucusloc

I loled, but it is so true.

Sianmink

It’s the Sanic Hegehog of rifles.

Rick5555

Freaking excellent. I’m looking at the pic, and read the caption and almost spit my coffee onto my screen. Just brilliant.

Cal S.

Well, that’s one way of integrating your monopod. But is it free-floated?

Roy Harden

I seem to recall as a teenager (maybe 15 years ago) that there were electronic full-auto trigger upgrade kits for various paintball markers. Although I’m sure it would be easy to mechanically alter the stock trigger groups for paintball markers (full-auto smg trigger groups are significantly less complex than semi-auto trigger groups,) it would also be pretty easy for a less than knowledgeable person who bought one of these semi-auto black market guns to use the electronic trigger upgrade (if they’re still available) to make it full auto.

DaveP.

A great gun to get another gun with.

Michael Rice

“You see Demetri, when magazine is larger than gun you is having no need for recoil and can use as monopod.” What is that thing, 100 rounds?

Jeff Heeszel

Looks like one of Royalnonesuch’s creations!

Southpaw89

On one hand the barrel would wear out very quickly, but on the other if they are really getting that stuff off of alibaba then replacement barrels are probably dirt cheap, and it probably doesn’t get fired that much anyways.